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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1411355" data-attributes="member: 812">Steven Brust and Steven Erikson.Brust writes witty, TIGHT novels with watchspring-like plots, snappy dialog and neat, well-structured sentences. Just watching him put words together is a treat. Add to that the fact that he's forever pushing at the boundaries of what the form will allow and you've got the best writer in fantasy today.Erikson has created a world so packed with characters and history and events and powers that it's impossible to keep track of everything that's happening, but he's such a good writer you just get carried away regardless. I've never before encountered a writer who spent so little time making sure his audience was keeping up; you NEVER get a few pages' worth of exposition to explain "The situation as it is now". The characters all know the situation so they never bother explaining it -- you just have to try and ferret out the clues and figure out what's happening. Fun stuff. And what he's attempting to do, to talk about, is of such breath-taking scope that I'm honestly blown away.Those two aside, I'll contest the suggestion that Martin is bringing fresh ideas in -- he's a good enough writer but I don't see he's doing anything new. Likewise Mieville, who I think owes most of his fame to the fact that PSS starts with a weird bug sex scene than anything else. Cause he's not much of a writer and his ideas are second-hand.The classics remain fresh. Lord Dunsany is a writer I've only just discovered and he's AMAZING. Unlike anything you've ever read, I guarantee it (unless, of course, you've read Lord Dunsany). Lieber, Herbert, Howard, Tolkien -- these are writers who stand the test. Lovecraft (when he's good) and Burroughs (the first few books in any series, at least) also keep influencing people.Most fantasy published in the last, say, twenty years (ever since The Sword of Shannara came out, I think, and proved there was a much bigger market than people had thought) has felt very contrived and derivative to me. It's mostly been people either attempting to copy Tolkien (dumbing him down in the process), or attempting to introduce dragons and unicorns into what are essentially romance novels. Potboilers, for the most part, done to varying degrees of skill, but still maintaining that whole "Will they escape in time? Will the guy and the girl get together? Will the bad guys triumph?" sort of story-telling that, while fine enough in and of itself, isn't very INTERESTING, intellectually speaking. It has nothing to say and it might as well not be a fantasy story -- the fantasy elements are for the most part purely marketing qualities (whether the authors think of  them that way or not).Very few writers in ANY field accomplish anything very interesting from one year to the next (Sturgeon's Law). Just being able to tell a good story is a rare enough gift.</blockquote>

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